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Vocabulary
Three layers, three vocabularies, one mapping.
The protocol returns a judgement about a proposed action. The signed dossier states what then happened. The decision route speaks stable wire tokens integrations branch on. Each layer has its own words, and this page defines all three — and how they line up.
Protocol verdicts
What the decision engine returns for a proposed action. These are the words on canonical diagrams 1 and 2, in the API docs, and in the govern GitHub Action.
ALLOWAuthorized
The action is within policy on the evidence presented. It executes, and the dossier records the authority it executed under.
ESCALATENeeds approval or more info
The action needs authority the requester does not hold, or evidence the request did not carry. It waits, routed to whoever can supply it.
BLOCKHigh risk or out of policy
The action breaches policy or crosses a risk threshold. It does not execute, and the dossier records which rule stopped it and on what evidence.
Dossier verdicts
What the signed record states about the outcome. These tokens live inside the Ed25519-signed payload, so they are never renamed — a rename would invalidate the signature on every dossier already issued.
AUTHORIZEDExecuted under recorded authority
The action was within policy on the evidence presented, and it ran. The dossier records the authority it executed under.
Corresponding protocol verdict
ALLOW
ESCALATERestrained and routed for human approval
The action was held short of execution and referred to someone who holds the authority to permit it. The dossier records which rule escalated it, and to whom. It is not a refusal — the action can still proceed once approved.
Corresponding protocol verdict
ESCALATE
BLOCKEDRefused outright
The action breached policy or crossed a risk threshold and did not execute. Nobody is asked to approve it. The dossier records the rule that refused it and the evidence behind that refusal.
Corresponding protocol verdict
BLOCK
PENDING_MFAAwaiting sign-off on a decisioning surface
The action is paused while sign-off completes on a connected decisioning surface — Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Webex — by someone who holds the authority to approve it. It is an approval hold, not a re-authentication challenge answered by the requester. The action has neither executed nor been refused — the record is open, and resolves when that sign-off lands.
Corresponding protocol verdict
ESCALATE
No exact protocol equivalent: PENDING_MFA is an open state awaiting sign-off on a decisioning surface, not a decision the engine returned. ESCALATE is the closest judgement.
Why there are three vocabularies
A protocol verdict is a judgement about a request; a dossier verdict is a statement about what happened to it; a ledger outcome is the wire token the decision route returns and every shipped integration branches on. Collapsing them would lose real distinctions — PENDING_MFA has no protocol word at all, and the wire keeps ESCALATE and REVIEW apart where the judgement folds them together. The dossier verdict is also written into the record before it is signed, so the token is part of the signed payload: renaming it would break verification on every record already issued — and renaming the wire tokens would break the branch condition in every caller.
What this means in practice: read the token in the vocabulary of the layer you are in, and use the mapping on this page to reconcile them. Anything asking “did this execute?” can rely on the correspondence rather than on string matching.
Ledger outcomes
What /v1/protocol/evaluate-decision returns in `outcome` and the decision ledger stores. These are the wire spellings of the protocol classes — APPROVE spells allow, REJECT spells block, and the held class splits in two — and they never change, because integrations branch on them.
APPROVEExecution continues
The wire spelling of the allow class on the decision route. The action is within policy on the evidence presented; execution continues, and the dossier records the authority it ran under.
Corresponding protocol verdict
ALLOW
ESCALATEHeld for a named approver
The same word in every layer. The action is held short of execution and routed to a named person who holds the authority to permit it. It can still proceed once approved.
Corresponding protocol verdict
ESCALATE
REJECTExecution stops
The wire spelling of the block class on the decision route. The action breached policy or crossed a risk threshold; it does not execute, and nobody is asked to approve it.
Corresponding protocol verdict
BLOCK
REVIEWQueued for review
The escalate class without a named approver yet — the decision is held in a queue, for example when no policy rule matched. Distinct from ESCALATE on the wire so the approval queue can tell routed holds from unrouted ones.
Corresponding protocol verdict
ESCALATE
Verdicts are not enforcement actions
The verdict is the judgement. The action is what the surface does about it — which is why one verdict can drive different enforcement at a checkout, an ERP posting, or an agent's tool call.
- Allow
- Block
- Require Approval
- Throttle / Limit
The protocol returns three verdicts; the dossier records four outcomes. The extra one is PENDING_MFA, an action paused mid-flight while sign-off completes on a connected decisioning surface (Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Webex) — an approval hold, not a re-authentication challenge answered by the requester. It has not yet resolved into either execution or refusal, and therefore has no protocol verdict of its own.
Surfaces are not connectors
These two words do different jobs, and blurring them makes the catalogue look twice as large as it is.
Surface
Surfaces are where people encounter Decionis — Shield, the sandbox, the governance console, MCP, the GitHub Action.
See all surfacesConnector
Connectors are how systems reach the protocol — webhooks, Zapier, Make, n8n, Shopify, SAP, Salesforce.
See all connectors